a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable.

Of course, people have been carping in this way for many centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” The sixteenth-century scientist Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an “always on” environment. In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would